Jim Hall and his fabled Chaparrals headline Road America

By
PETE LYONS

Aug 23, 2001

Troy Rogers stands ready beside the louver-bedecked Chaparral 2, just as he used to. Jim Hall settles once more into the composite cockpit that he molded around himself back in 1963. It fits his still-lean, lanky frame perfectly—as does his old driver’s suit. The ingrained starting drill comes back as readily: First plant your left foot on the brake and shove the shifter into low, and only then fire the Chevy.

The aluminum small-block lights instantly, its eight stub stacks emitting a vigorous, eager crackle. At least old race cars can hold onto their youth. This one is already straining to go, churning the oil in the torque converter, held back only by the brakes. Hall simply releases them, and this ivory apparition from a distant time is free to run again.

As the historic machine accelerates onto the Road America track, scene of two of its great victories in 1965, the converter keeps the engine at a constant growl while velocity builds. It’s like the steady roar of a Reno air racer on takeoff... except that here a resonance comes back from deep in the Wisconsin woods. Is it merely sonic reflection from thousands of trees?

Or is it an echo from the glory years? That exciting era when the Road Runners from Texas were not only the dominant force in American sports car racing, but an astounding, fabulous, phenomenal leap forward in the world’s very conception of a racing car.

If today, looking back, the whole Chaparral story sounds like a myth... well, that’s pretty much how it seemed then, too.

See if you can sell this one to the movies. There’s a little bunch of amateur sports car racers, see, who hail from the scrub-brush obscurity of West Texas. Just the place to manufacture state-of-the-art road race cars, right? Anyway, every so often these guys pop up at the continent’s top tracks, where they unload home-built specials so novel they drop jaws, and so fast they threaten to win every time out.

Plastic chassis... aluminum replicas of iron production engines... “automatic” transmissions... driver-operable “flipper” wings mounted upside-down... one car that is half roadster, half coupe... another with a second engine and extractor fans to clamp the car to the road like a giant suction cup... all produced in a secret lab, complete with a private test track. Hey, let’s call it “Rattlesnake Raceway.”

Our hero is a wealthy young oilman who’s tall and slim and looks good in a cowboy hat. Plus, he’s an excellent race driver—a former F1 driver, no less—as well as a brilliant, imaginative race car designer. And, and, how about we give him a clandestine engineering liaison with the world’s largest automaker. Preposterous! But true. All that happened. And here to prove it is tall Jim Hall with four of his Chaparrals.

His long racing career finally, firmly behind him, Hall is living a quiet, reclusive life. He and wife Sandy have become very serious about golf. But only days shy of his 66th birthday, he has come to RA to be grand marshal at the BRIC—the Brian Redman International Challenge, a vintage event named for the driver who won three champion-ships in Hall-managed F5000 cars, 1974-76.

Grand marshal: It’s a cloak of honor that must drape awkwardly over the shoulders of a hard-core, no-nonsense racer. And as the weekend develops, this very private man must be surprised by the endless throngs of people who want to see him, speak with him, ask him to sign something. The surprise is evident in the gracious “Thank you,” he returns along with the autograph.

Other things feel unfamiliar today, too. Chaparral Cars used to tow its fantastic machines on open trailers; to the team they were just disposable raceware. This time they’ve been transported in 18-wheel splendor; rumor says they’ve been specially insured for $2 million—each. Back home in Midland, plans are afoot to build a museum around them. Opening is scheduled for 2003.

It won’t have to be a very big building. People who remember all those Road Runners in all those races are always amazed to learn the actual total number of Chaparral-built sports car chassis: just seven. Six still exist, now lovingly restored by Rogers, one of the craftsmen who built them originally in Texas. (A series of five front-engined predecessors named Chaparral 1s came from Troutman and Barnes in California. One of those was at the BRIC, too.)

So few, really? Well, Chaparral Cars was small, efficient and unromantic, and kept turning one car into another. There were three fiberglass-chassied roadsters originally called Chaparral 2s (only later dubbed 2A by outsiders, when subsequent models appeared). After three highly successful SCCA seasons, 1963-65, two of those were given roofs and big-block Chevys to make them into 2D coupes for FIA endurance racing in 1966; a D won the 1000-K at Germany’s old Nurburgring.

Then one of those Ds and the remaining 2(A) became 1967’s 2F coupes; one took victory at Brands Hatch in England. Three chassis, seven race cars. Rogers has now turned one of those Fs back into the “A” Hall drove at the BRIC; it happens to be the one that took the 12 Hours of Sebring in that form in 1965. The remaining 2F, the Brands winner, was on display only.

Similarly, a series of aluminum-monocoque sports racers began with 1965’s 2C. That was modified into the first 2E, the winged car that startled the world in the inaugural Can-Am season in 1966. The same chassis later became the big-block 2G for 1967 and ’68. It was this in which Hall suffered a career-ending accident at a Las Vegas track called Stardust. Heavily damaged, that’s the one chassis that was finally scrapped, according to Rogers. “Jim couldn’t even look at a picture of it without getting the shakes.”The second 2E, winner of Chaparral’s only Can-Am victory (Laguna Seca, 1966), was at Road America and Hall briefly demonstrated that too. Totals: two more chassis, four more “cars.”

Left home along with the restored 2D was the unloved 2H, 1969’s infamous “white whale” quasi-coupe, known fairly or not as Hall’s only failure. But present with honor was the 2J, the notorious, controversial Ground Effects Vehicle, or Sucker Car, of 1970. That one worked so well it was promptly banned. The seventh Chaparral chassis, it was to be the last of the Chaparral sports car line. Later there were some 2K single-seaters, which brought ground effects to Indianapolis and took the 500 in 1980.

Wait a minute—haven’t we left out a Chaparral 2B? Yes, there’s a car in Hall’s collection called that, but it isn’t really a Chaparral. It was built as a research project by Jim’s engineer friends in Chevy R&D. Tested extensively at Rattlesnake, it taught both parties a lot, and led to Hall’s choice of aluminum for the 2C chassis. This was only one example of the clandestine cooperation between Chaparral and Chevrolet. Another was the Sucker, which began life in Detroit as another Chevy experiment.

Rogers has to patiently explain all this over and over. He too must be incredulous about the crowds clustering around the four plain white old cars he’s minding. For so long, they were so secret. For decades, the public rarely saw them. Hasn’t everybody forgotten?

Not likely. True significance has a way of living on, and besides, this setting points out the magnitude of Chaparral’s accomplishments in its day. A featured race for vintage Can-Am cars has brought together a good sampling of Road Runner rivals—would-be rivals. The most casual look at them shows how conservative, how conventional, how pedestrian, were so many creative minds in the racing world outside Jim Hall’s fence. Many are good race cars, arguably even better race cars, because they won more races. But...

But they don’t stand tall in the mind like the tall white Road Runners from the barren Texas plains.

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